Windows 7 and Thinkpads - Wireless on and off switch with Intel My WiFi

There have been cases where the wireless chipset on Thinkpads have been disabled even though the hardware switch for wireless had been switched on. Before v12.4 of Intel's wireless drivers, there really wasn't a consistent way to re-enable the wireless radio inside the operating system.

If you only install the updated drivers for the Intel wireless chipset, you won't get the 'On/Off' functionality.



You need to install the 'MyWifi' aka 'Software mode Wireless AP' even if you don't plan on using that feature.



A nice side effect of the new My Wifi option is that there is a Wireless On/Off available from your taskbar.

If you are having trouble enabling the Bluetooth radio even though the hardware switch is 'On', you can use the workaround I detailed here.

A nice side note: The newer versions of the Intel Matrix Storage Manager and Intel Turbo Memory Panel seem to have support for Windows 7 out of the box. You no longer have to 'fool' the installers by saying that you are running Windows Vista.

I still get the CPU pegged from time to time from the Intel Application Pinning service, which is fixed with a simple service restart. It is as if the service is stuck inside a kernel mode loop. I still haven't been able to get the Turbo Ram (non-user pinning mode) to stay consistently enabled across reboots. I always end up with a 1.37GB partition that doesn't have a drive letter and isn't enabled for ReadyBoost, from what I can tell.